The co-owner of an Ottawa security firm was fined $1,500 Thursday for violating Canada’s Copyright Act.

Jean-François Demers, 27, pleaded guilty last week to making counterfeit copies of Microsoft Windows and Office software available for sale.

Demers denied knowing the software was counterfeit when he purchased it from a Chinese website. However, Demers admitted he violated the Copyright Act when he neglected to take down his online ad after a RCMP computer technician who bought copies of the software discovered they were authentic-looking fakes and told him so.

Ontario Court Justice Ann Alder said the public eventually paid for the economic losses incurred by companies from the sale of counterfeit goods. As a result, Alder said she didn’t find it was in the public’s interest to grant Demers the absolute discharge he had been seeking.

Making available counterfeit items for sale carries a maximum fine of $25,000 and six months in jail, Alder said, although the judge recognized that what Demers had done was on the lower end of the scale.

Demers had purchased approximately 420 copies of the programs and had been selling them for several months before being charged. When police searched his home in March, they seized 408 Microsoft programs and four copies of Rosetta Stone language learning software.

Demers had purchased the programs for $25 to $50. He was selling them for between $120 and $150, considerably less than the usual $350 retail price.

Demers spent more than $9,000 purchasing the software, money he has lost, his lawyer said. Demers offered full refunds to several people who purchased the programs after learning they were counterfeit.

The Crown had been seeking a $3,000 fine equivalent to the profits he would have made had he sold the replica software seized by police.

Demers is the co-owner of Armour 1 Security, a fledgling company providing security services.

Source:http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Vendor+fined+counterfeit+software+programs/5868134/story.html?cid=megadrop_story

MIT researchers have developed an experimental software framework called Jolt that allows applications to recover in some cases when they hang. When Jolt detects that a program is stuck in a certain kind of infinite loop, it can force it to exit the loop and continue executing.

arstechnica
The researchers have published a paper that describes their implementation of Jolt and how it performed in a number of tests against bugs in well-known open source software utilities. In several test cases, Jolt allowed hung programs to continue to completion in situations where the user would otherwise have to forcefully terminate the process.

The inspiration for the research project came from a bug in Microsoft Word. An MIT professor was writing a document in the word processor one morning when it froze unexpectedly. Using a debugging tool, he found the loop in which the program was stuck and forced it to move on, allowing him to save his document and restart the program. He described the incident in an e-mail to his colleague, Professor Martin Rinard, who then got the idea of building an automated tool for breaking out of infinite loops.

The idea is compelling, but the initial implementation comes with some caveats. The method that Jolt uses to identify infinite loops is very limited. Jolt compares the program’s state during each iteration of a loop to determine if the values are changing. If the program’s state remains the same between iterations, Jolt will cause the program to branch out of the loop so that execution can continue.

Jolt isn’t effective in cases where the operations within a loop are changing the program’s state but not changing it in ways that fulfill the loop’s natural exit condition. Another issue is that Jolt can’t identify infinite loops that are caused by recursive function calls.

In order for Jolt to work properly, the source code of an application has to be modified during compilation to inject function calls for tracking loop entry and exit. To accomplish this, the researchers built on the Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) compiler infrastructure and added a step to perform the necessary modifications to the code. It also adds a label outside of each loop to indicate where the execution should be picked back up when Jolt causes the program to exit the loop.

The real heavy lifting in Jolt is done by a dynamic instrumentation system that attaches to a program at runtime and tracks operations that write to memory during loops. It uses that data to build a snapshot of the memory state when it reaches the beginning of each loop. The snapshots are compared to determine if the state is actually changing. The researchers built their dynamic instrumentation mechanism on top of Pin.

To see how Jolt works in practice, the researchers put it to the test with real-world software. In one of the tests, they pitted Jolt against a Python parsing bug in ctags, a tool that analyzes code and generates an index of names. There was apparently a bug that causes ctags to go into an infinite loop when it encounters two triple-quoted strings on the same line.

Without Jolt, ctags would just hang indefinitely upon hitting that error, forcing the user to terminate the process. Jolt allowed the program to finish running. It moves on and finishes other files that is supposed to process, leaving abridged data for the file where the error was encountered.

They performed similar tests with other common command line tools, including grep and ping. In seven of their eight tests, Jolt identified the infinite loop within half a second or less and allowed the program to continue. In two of the eight test cases, the program emitted the same output when performed with a fixed version of the program and when Jolt was used to exit a loop.

The paper also includes data that show how Jolt instrumentation impacts the performance of an application. The overhead ranges from 0.5 percent to 8.6 percent.

The researchers’ findings are intriguing and offer some insight into how automated mechanisms can be used to allow users to recover from certain kinds of program faults. The project still obviously has a ways to go before it will be a practical option for regular end users.

The researchers are working on a follow-up, called Bolt, that they hope will overcome the need for static instrumentation at compile time. That could help the project move one step closer to delivering a convenient standalone solution for unhanging hung applications.

Source:http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/jolt-software-program-rescue/

Gulfstream Aerospace Corp.’s G250 Integration Test Facility (ITF) has accumulated 1,000 hours of testing on the PlaneView250 software load that will be the basis for securing the aircraft’s initial Type Certificate. Gulfstream reached the milestone just four months after evaluation of the Rockwell Collins-provided avionics software began.

Rockwell Collins is a strategic partner on the PlaneView250 flight deck, which features Pro Line Fusion avionics.

The G250 facility is the first mid-cabin ITF for Gulfstream. The company initiated the ITF concept with the large-cabin GV and developed similar facilities for the G450 and G550. Those facilities, located with the G250 ITF at the company’s headquarters in Savannah, are still in use today.

The enhanced value delivered to customers through the testing conducted with the large-cabin ITFs as well as the introduction of Rockwell Collins’ Fusion platform for PlaneView250 drove Gulfstream’s decision to establish a G250 ITF, company officials say.

The G250 ITF was initially powered on Nov. 20, 2007, and had its first simulated flight on July 7, 2008.

The facility allows engineers to perform a thorough analysis of the aircraft’s avionics and electronics to ensure they meet the certification requirements.

The facility is also ideal for human-factors analysis, allowing certification authorities to make and test changes on the ground before applying them to the actual aircraft.

“The cockpit of the G250 is going to lead the industry,” says Pres Henne, senior vice president, Programs, Engineering and Test, Gulfstream. “This test facility is a critical step in bringing this aircraft to market, because it allows us to integrate, test, and make adjustments on the ground.”

“It’s been a great tool,” says Mark Kohler, G250 program director, Gulfstream. “It allows us to do the testing in a very safe environment and at a much quicker pace.

That’s the significance, to be able to accelerate the development effort and ensure the end product exceeds customers’ expectations.”

In addition to testing, Gulfstream utilizes the ITF to demonstrate the aircraft’s capabilities to the Gulfstream Customer Advisory Board (CAB) and potential customers.

CAB participants are Gulfstream operators who provide input on aircraft in development and feedback on services the company offers.

Source:http://www.militaryaerospace.com/index/display/avi-article-display/5241538245/articles/avionics-intelligence/news/2010/9/software-testing_milestone.html

Vedero Software and Cirro Energy Services are teaming up to provide commercial building operators with a convenient way to save energy, reduce costs and increase revenue while assisting in handling electricity market emergencies and other strains on the electric grid.

Vedero Software is a leading provider of software for automated demand response, and Cirro Energy Services is an expert in energy management, demand response, and renewable energy consulting services.

They have teamed up to provide ways for commercial building operators in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) market to trim power usage when needed, yet still provide heating and cooling to keep occupants comfortable.

The companies will enable commercial buildings to participate in two types of demand response programs in Texas: 1) emergency-based, grid reliability demand response programs such as the Emergency Interruptible Load Service (EILS) sponsored by ERCOT and 2) demand response programs seeking to reduce load during summer peak demand periods.

ERCOT has allocated $50 million in 2010 for its EILS demand response program and will provide payments to large electricity users that temporarily curtail use during an electricity market emergency.

Key demand response programs, aimed at reducing electricity use during summer peak demand periods, will include Commercial Load Management program sponsored by local utilities, and Cirro Energy Services proprietary Four Coincidental Peaks (4CP) automated service:

Commercial buildings – including office complexes, hospitals, schools, universities, and data centers – consume more than 40 percent of the electricity in North America, and the operators that manage these buildings are keenly interested in participating in demand response. However, curtailing electricity must be balanced to accommodate the needs of the building occupants.

Vedero Software meets the emerging critical requirement of providing a robust platform that ensures maximization of demand response events, while maintaining occupant comfort through existing Building Automation Systems.

Cirro Energy Services has built a substantial base of intellectual property advising commercial and industrial clients how to optimally participate in demand response programs in electric markets across the nation.

Additionally, Cirro Energy Services leads the market in predicting and informing clients of the likelihood of emergency and economic events occurring so that they can generate maximum revenue and cost savings without disrupting operations.

Initial Vedero Software platform integration has already been completed utilizing sophisticated predictive demand response algorithms developed by Cirro Energy Services.

“Our partnership with Vedero Software is a unique and progressive solution,” said Michael Cozzi, Director of Cirro Energy Services. “The automation and critical market knowledge delivered through this integration allows our companies to efficiently deliver unique value to the growing commercial sector of the ERCOT market.”

“We are excited to be pairing with Cirro Energy Services to help customers through automating demand response,” said Joe Pollard, CEO, Vedero Software. “We have already implemented the solution in customer environments and are very pleased with the results of the joint solution.”

Source:http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/09/prweb4442894.htm

Alliance Management & Consulting Group of Canton, Ga., recently became the new owner of two industry service programs, the company announced.

MShop Software (now Marine Shop) is a marine service department software program that was developed in 1992 and specializes in small service-only repair shops. WatchCaptain Professional (now Management Pro) software specializes in small- to medium-sized marine businesses that require full management features with an accounting general ledger.

“Our studies show that most of the failed businesses lacked a strong service commitment. Therefore, when boat sales dropped off they had no support system in place to survive the economic downturn,” Allied president and founder Joe De Marco said in a statement. “We can offer that support system.”

Source:http://www.tradeonlytoday.com/home/505702-georgia-firm-acquires-marine-software-programs